On June 28, 2007, Nokia was the top selling mobile-phone company in the world, people stopped working when they left their computers, Android phones didn't exist, and high-powered executives were addicted to thumbing on their BlackBerrys.

At $600, it was a luxury item at first. But five years later, the phone's dramatic impact can be seen in our daily lives, schools, factories and boardrooms. To date, more than 217 million iPhones have been sold, and they're being used by construction workers to read blueprints, doctors to diagnose patients, governments to improve services and parents to quiet their kids in restaurants.

To ring in its 5th birthday, here are five ways the iPhone has made a mark on the world.

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The true cost of an iPhone

The original iPhone cost $600 or higher and came with only a handful of pre-loaded apps.

In 2007, we were a nation of skilled texters, banging out OMG-filled coded messages at lightning speeds on numerical keypads and physical keyboards. The iPhone was lacking either of those, instead offering a nothing-but-screen keyboard.

It was a classic Apple move toward dead-simple usability, and it helped bring a slice of computing to a whole new audience, including technophobes, kids, senior citizens and people with visual or hearing impairments.

Suddenly, users could navigate their phones with a few swipes of the finger. Kids intuitively seemed to know how to use it. And the phone ushered in a new wave of touchscreen devices.

After the hefty price tag, the lack of a physical keyboard was the first complaint many reviewers lodged against the iPhone. It didn't scare off consumers, though, and Apple sold a million iPhones in less than three months. Typing speeds on the iPhone still may not rival a pair of BlackBerry thumbs at their peak, but predictive-text software, spell check and, later, cut and paste have made it a usable alternative.

Photos: A visual history of the telephone 20 photos

Photos: A visual history of the telephone20 photos

A visual history of the telephone – Fifty years ago, the first push-button telephone was introduced. The electronic system featured Touch-Tone dialing and was offered to Bell customers on November 18, 1963. Click through the gallery to see a visual history of the telephone.

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Photos: A visual history of the telephone20 photos

A visual history of the telephone – Alexander Graham Bell invented the liquid transmitter, the first practical means of sending voice calls, in 1876.

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Photos: A visual history of the telephone20 photos

A visual history of the telephone – This 1924 phone booth in London features a wall-mounted phone with separate mouthpiece and receiver.

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Photos: A visual history of the telephone20 photos

A visual history of the telephone – The telephone has come a long way from the 1930s, when rotary-dial models like this one were popular.

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A visual history of the telephone – This rotary phone in Reading, Pennsylvania, could be used to summon police, ambulance or fire services at a moment's notice in the 1930s.

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Photos: A visual history of the telephone20 photos

A visual history of the telephone – Rotary-dial telephones with separate mouthpieces and receivers were commonly referred to as "candlestick" phones. This model from the mid-1930s features the rotary dial in the shaft of the telephone.

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Photos: A visual history of the telephone20 photos

A visual history of the telephone – This 1950s rotary phone features an attached mouthpiece and receiver.

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Photos: A visual history of the telephone20 photos

A visual history of the telephone – Here English troops call their loved ones in 1956 after being told to prepare for duty in the Suez Canal Zone. Payphones were common until cell phones became popular and affordable.

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A visual history of the telephone – Some of the first push-button phones are pictured here in 1971.

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A visual history of the telephone – French skier Franck Piccard talks on his mobile phone after an event at the 1988 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

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A visual history of the telephone – This mobile phone was marketed by Racal-Vodac Limited in 1997 to serve either as a portable unit or as a mobile unit installed in a car. The unit was sold with a battery charger and extension antenna for areas with poor reception.

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A visual history of the telephone – Cell phone manufacturers made great strides between 1997 and 2004. The Palm Treo 600 smartphone, pictured here in 2004, integrated telephone with e-mail and Internet-browsing capabilities.

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A visual history of the telephone – Motorola's MPx wireless device, released in the second half of 2004, took the smartphone to a new level with Wi-Fi capabilities and a fully functional keyboard.

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A visual history of the telephone – The first-generation Apple iPhone, released on June 29, 2007, had people lining up for days to buy one. A huge advancement in phones at the time, it incorporated a touchscreen, apps, e-mail, Web surfing and a host of other features.

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A visual history of the telephone – The BlackBerry Bold 9930, shown here, was one of many BlackBerry devices so popular in the early 2000s they were dubbed "CrackBerries." Popular for business applications because of their full keyboards and advanced e-mail capabilities, most BlackBerrys have since been eclipsed by flashier smartphones.

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A visual history of the telephone – The iPhone 4S, released in 2011, expanded on the iPhone's innovations with its high-resolution screen and Siri, Apple's voice-activated virtual "assistant."

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A visual history of the telephone – The original Motorola Droid was the thinnest of its kind at its 2011 release. Motorola's Droid Razr Maxx, seen here on display at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, has a longer battery life than previous models.

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A visual history of the telephone – Last year, Samsung's Galaxy S III overtook Apple's iPhone 4S to become the world's best-selling smartphone for the third quarter, according to research by Strategy Analytics.

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A visual history of the telephone – The iPhone 5 looks similar to previous models but has a larger screen and is lighter and thinner than the iPhone 4S. The phone also comes with a faster processor called the Apple A6, which connects to mobile carriers with a 4G LTE connection.

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A visual history of the telephone – BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins displays two new Blackberry 10 smartphones January 30 in New York. The Z10, left, features an all-touch keyboard. The Q10 features a classic BlackBerry tactile keyboard.

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EXPAND GALLERY

In October, Apple tried to shake up input again with the introduction of the Siri voice-assistant feature. The voice-recognition technology encouraged users to speak commands and questions instead of of tapping them in on the screen.

Rise of the app

The iPhone's killer feature was not that tough, expansive glass touchscreen. It was the mobile operating system, iOS, and the tightly controlled App Store released a year later in 2008 that made the iPhone into, well, whatever you wanted it to be.

The original device was useful enough: It shipped with a built-in Apple apps for checking the Internet, weather, e-mail, texts, stocks, calendars and the time. But when the App Store opened, people suddenly had access to a stockpile of well-designed third-party apps, and developers were able to build an astonishing variety of custom apps.

With the right app, an iPhone could track the sun, sync shopping lists, be a drum machine, take restaurant reservations, be a cash register. Meanwhile, Apple's TV ads made "there's an app for that" into a catchphase and a headline cliche.

In classic Steve Jobs style, Apple took complete control of the sales and app-approval ecosystem. Apps have to be approved by Apple before they can be sold, meaning fewer spam apps and viruses make it through to consumers. It also means the company can reject apps as it pleases -- say, when a feature competes with an Apple product -- to the occasional displeasure of the developer community.

The App Store has also created a new mini-economy. Apple has paid out more than $5 billion to developers, and that's after taking a 30% cut off all app sales for itself. Today, there are more than 650,000 mobile apps available in the App Store, ranging from free to $1,000 for specialized business applications.

24/7 Internet

The iPhone ushered in an age of all Internet, all the time. For better or worse, it's blurred the lines between work and home lives, made communication a round-the-clock habit and led to a host of new rules about when and how it's appropriate to use smartphones (not while walking, driving, playing trivia or on a date, please).

The phone, whose price soon dropped to $200 or less with a two-year wireless contract, gave users instant access to a multitude of ways to communicate: texts, e-mail, Twitter, Instagram, Grindr, Foursquare, Facebook, FaceTime. There's even a so-so phone on there. Mobile phones had limited Internet access before the iPhone, but the device's browser was a huge improvement, displaying webpages more like they actually looked on a desktop computer.

All this connectivity brought a new disorder: smartphone addiction. A recent study by gadget-resale site Gazelle found that 15% of respondents would rather give up sex than go without their iPhones for a weekend. That type of titillating stat is not surprising to anyone for whom the iPhone is the last thing they see at night and first thing they check in the morning.

Supply-chain activism

As Apple grew from underdog into the largest company in the world by market cap (it made $108 billion in 2011), its manufacturing chain was pushed to greater and greater limits -- and into the spotlight. The Foxconn plants in China that produce Apple's iPhones, iPads and other products were called out in the press and by activist groups for poor working conditions, long hours and low wages.

While bad press for Apple, the controversy drew much-needed attention to electronics supply chains. The Foxconn plant was called out for producing Apple products, although it also assembles products for other major electronics companies including Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony and Intel.

To quell the backlash, major tech companies are feeling the pressure and changing how they operate. When he took over as Apple CEO, Tim Cook agreed to allow a third party, the Fair Labor Association, audit its China factories and address any issues that were found. And just this week, Google unveiled a media-streaming device, the Nexus Q, which is made in the U.S.

An industry revived

The iPhone may have helped kill the BlackBerry, but it gave birth to a new beefed-up genre of mobile devices. Google went on to release its own more developer-friendly mobile operating system, Android. Microsoft threw its hat into the ring with Windows Phone OS. Most major mobile phone companies now produce touchscreen smartphones.

Some might say the iPhone and its cousin, the iPod Touch, helped spawn the larger iPad, with its identical touchscreen interface. That hit device was birthed in 2010 and quickly created a new gadget market, leaving rivals scrambling to catch up. Now Amazon, Google and Microsoft all have new or forthcoming tablets.

Five years after the iPhone hit the market -- and the culture -- the tech industry as a whole is thriving and innovating. It probably won't be another five years before the next big thing shakes up technology again.